I know the whole death penalty arguement is oooold as time, but I've always heard the arguement that putting a death row prisoner to death costs more than keeping them alive for the rest of their natural life. My question is how is that possible. I've also heard that keeping death row prisoners in prisons costs ~20-30k a year...so if both rumors I've heard are true (which I doubt, but just for the sake of arguement lets say they are), that would mean that putting a prisoner to death would cost close to a million if the death row/lifetime prisoner were in prison for 40 years.

Can someone clear up all this?

 

It does not cost more to put a death row prisoner to death. Its the anti capital punishment morons that sing that song.

 

It costs more because of the legal fees involved in fighting all the possible appeals available to a death row inmate.

 

Exactly the reason.

When a person is sent to death row they cannot just accept it and let things take their course, instead they are required (yes required) to make no less than 3 appeals to the verdict in the hopes to be commuted to life sentence or whatever they can get.

The average for the appeal process is upwards of 8 years and is very expensive because 99% of the time the lawyers used are paid for by the state in which the person was convicted in.

This process was enacted years ago in the hopes that no one person would be sentenced to death wrongly and would have a proper chance at proving their innocence or the lesser degree of the crime. It's kind of a double edged sword since by enacting this process they are pointing out that the judicial process is or can be faulty (we all knew this anyways) and that people will lie to cover the truth even under oath (we also knew this)

 

Add to the lawyer fees the fact that most death row prisoners are housed separate faciliites, with separate staff, and with different amenities from the rest of the prisoners.